By: Parker Lemke
In his office, Jim Anderson lifted up a dried pennycress stem, pulled off a pod and sprinkled its small black seeds onto his desk.
“We’ve been working on trying to kill this thing for over 100 years, probably,” said Anderson, an agronomy and plant genetics professor at the University of
Minnesota.
The common weed could soon become an actual crop in Minnesota thanks to a University effort to keep more of the state’s 27 million acres of farmland covered during the winter using perennial plants and other crops.